I Hear A New World

[...] the first of his five Long London novels, The Great When set in 1949 in an alternative London. The subsequent books will be set in 1959, 1969, 1979, and then jumping to 1999. And now, we have learned the name of the second of that novel, I Hear A New World.

The second book is titled after the album by Joe Meek, I Hear A New World, recorded in 1959 but released in 1960, subtitled "an outer space music fantasy". One of the most influential record producers and sound engineers, Joe Meek, was the first to conceive of the recording studio itself as an instrument and one of the first producers to be recognised as an artist in his own right. Working with many artists, he may be best known for the Tornado's track Telstar in 1962, written and produced by Meek, the first record by a British rock group to reach number one in the USA. But he is also famed for taking a shotgun owned by musician Heinz Burt, killing his landlady, Violet Shenton, and then shooting himself in 1967. Those last moments of Joe Meek's life also featured in Alan Moore's spoken word performance art piece The Highbury Working, A Beat Séance, created by The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels collaborative team of Moore, David J, and Tim Perkins and performed on the 20th of November 1997 at the performance club Absorption at The Garage in Highbury, with dancer Paule van Wijngaarden. The words to the track No 1 With A Bullet can be read here. Perkins used samples from I Hear a New World for the soundtrack.

Source: BleedingCool

Swampy by Aaron Campbell

Art by Aaron Campbell

Above, a gorgeous Swamp Thing commission by the amazing Aaron Campbell.

 

For more info about the artist, visit his Instagram page HERE. 

Ben Wickey is... a Great Enchanter!

From artist Ben Wickey's Instagram page. You can read it HERE, posted the 16th of October.

Ben Wickey: After three years of keeping this under my hat, I am so excited to finally share some of the work I did on Alan Moore and Steve Moore's MOON AND SERPENT BUMPER BOOK OF MAGIC, which was just released today! Between 2021 and 2022, I illustrated 50 biographic comic book pages known as OLD MOORES' LIVES OF THE GREAT ENCHANTERS for this incredible tome. [...] Massive thanks to [...] Alan Moore for choosing an unknown weirdo like me to embark on one of the most thrilling, fun, and deeply fulfilling projects of my life. [...] 

Art by Ben Wickey

Comics in Magic Land

Magic is here!

Below, excerpt from an interview posted on PW some days ago, on the occasion of the upcoming The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic release. 

In this excerpt Moore talks about the comics contained in the book and his final comics work. With a bit of surprise revelation, too. 

Read the complete piece HERE.

Alan Moore: "Ben Wickey’s amazing ‘Great Enchanters’ pages could have come from one of those improving boys’ weekly papers like Look & Learn, while the late, great Kevin O’Neill’s scurrilous “Adventures of Alexander” is from the more working-class tradition of weekly comics like the Beano or Dandy. I should point out, though, that the Bumper Book isn’t and was never intended to be my final work in comics.

My final work in comics, completed in 2018, was the fourth and last volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Kevin O’Neill. I’d finished writing all of the Bumper Book’s comic strip material by the spring of 2014, and the whole book by 2015—it’s just taken us ten years to find all the artists and for them to complete the work to such a spectacularly high standard.

There may also be other comic book work out there, as yet unpublished, but volume four of The League was my last comic strip work, and was also, I think, a fond and comprehensive farewell to the medium. The Bumper Book, commenced around 2007, was always seen as a beautiful and accessible grimoire that happened to contain some comic strip material. It was intended purely as a statement about magic, rather than as a statement about comics."

The interview is available HERE.

A car crash of ideas

From How ‘The Great When’ by Alan Moore Got Made published on Publishers Weekly site.

A novel is more like a car crash of ideas. In this case I felt compelled to write something about London’s more spectral low-life figures, and to pick up on author Arthur Machen’s notion of a truer world concealed behind our own. I’d like the reader to know that, other than many of the characters and all of the historic detail, this book is an outrageous fantasy of things that never happened, and also that, in the riotous secret soul of London, every word of it is somehow true. - Alan Moore

You can read the complete article HERE.

Alan Moore by Phil Elliott

Art by Phil Elliott

Above, a stunning portrait and memory of Alan Moore by British illustrator, comic book artist and colorist PHIL ELLIOTT.

 

For more info about the artist, visit his official site, HERE.

Dr. Manhattan by Federico Mele

Art by Federico Mele

Above, a Dr. Manhattan commission by Italian comic book artist, illustrator and storyteller FEDERICO MELE.

See more about the illustration's process HERE.

Visit the artist's Instagram page HERE.

The Book Lovers by Steve Aylett

Below, Alan Moore's words of appreciation for The Book Lovers, Steve Aylett's new book to be released this December. 

"In the whole of language there is nothing like Steve Aylett, and The Book Lovers is his most relentless assault yet on our prissy synapses. Every sentence is a nifty seizure that will slug his reader through the printed page into a better and less reasonable world, a fugue-state heaven of excruciating beauty that spends dazzling insight as though it were chocolate money. Utterly astonishing, and possibly some manner of police procedural. Read this now before it happens." ― Alan Moore, author of  Jerusalem 

For more info about the book, visit the author's site HERE.

All films are haunted

Below, a statement from Moore promoting Last Movies, Stanley Schtinter's new work.

The book seems a really interesting reading: "Last Movies remaps the century of cinema according to the final films watched by some of its cultural icons, giving an audience the opportunity to ‘see what those who see no more last saw’."

All films are haunted, both by the immortal light of the sooner-or-later dead that they curate, and by the filaments of meaning they extrude into unscripted human lives. Last Movies is an unexpectedly revealing catalogue of final interchanges between imminent ghosts and counterpart electric spectres on the screen’s far side.
Profound and riveting, Schtinter’s graveyard perspective offers up a rich and startlingly novel view of cinema, angled through cemetery gates before the closing credits.
A remarkable accomplishment.
--- Alan Moore

More info at the author's site. Buy a copy HERE.

The outrageous edifice of The Great When

Moore speaks about his new book in a short video shared by Bloomsbury on their FB page.

You can watch it HERE.

Alan Moore: For me, when writing The Great When and the subsequent books in The Long London series, the most enjoyable thing has been taking actual history and then managing to fill the cracks in that history with delirious fantasy. So that I hope that the reader will sometimes find it difficult to tell the difference between the two. 

Starting the series in 1949 seemed like a good move because at that time London was in pieces, shattered by the events of the previous five or six years by the hail of bombs and V bombs. After which I would imagine that the average Londoner’s sense of reality had been drastically overhauled psychologically and socially. The whole of the city, the whole of the country was in pieces, it was in fragments. It was trying to work out what was going on and what its identity was. It was very unstable. We had questions of whether we should adopt nuclear weapons were starting to arise. We had a rise in what we would today call serial murderers after the Second World War. 

All of these things gave the landscape a very uneasy and shifting uncertain feeling. And upon that landscape in 1949 I thought that that would make a wonderful setting on which to erect the outrageous edifice of The Great When.

Alan Moore and Harry Smith

In 2011 Moore paid homage to American countercultural giant Harry Smith.

Below, excerpts from a review of the event published on BFI site.

[...] The polymath spirit of American countercultural hero Harry Smith – filmmaker, artist, folk-song collector, psychonaut and magician – is hard to pin down, let alone summon in the sedate surroundings of the Barbican’s cinema. Yet writer Alan Moore and artist, critic and musician Edwin Pouncey pay their respects admirably tonight, in an event programmed as part of the Barbican’s Watch Me Move: The Animation Show exhibition, conjuring up a soundtrack of poetic biography and collaged noise to a screening of Smith’s No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic (1957).

 

[...] Moore’s skill as a comics writer fits him well for narrating the moving image. Seated in a conspicuously cosy leather chair (which throws a distracting shadow across the screen), he recounts a subjective version of Smith’s life story, from Portland, Oregon childhood to death at the Chelsea Hotel, in a rhythmic present-tense style. Moore’s eye for everyday, even trashy magic is keen and wry, evoking the occult power of New York City’s streets and peep shows, and journeying with abandon into Smith’s psychic and physical desires. [...]

Read the article HERE. Pics of the event HERE.

Harry Smith's movies: Heaven and Earth Magic - Early Abstractions

 

And... I'd love to read Moore's complete text on Harry Smith and/or watch the whole performance!